I am broadly interested in the genetics of adaptation and speciation. How do new species form? How does adaptive variation arise and spread? How is morphological variation created through development and modified by natural selection? Is evolution predictable?
The focus of my lab’s...
In our lab, we investigate sensory and cognitive mechanisms underlying animal behavior. Animals use a wide array of cues and signals to glean information about their environment. An animal’s sensory and perceptual systems filter incoming stimuli and define an animal’s Umwelt, or the...
My colleagues and I bring field-collected leaf beetles (principally Cassidinae sensu lato) into the lab to more carefully observe and photograph feeding behavior and to archive the various immature stages for systematic morphological study. Insects are labeled and stored in ethanol at -20C and...
It is much faster to learn to recognize a new prey item from a neighboring species, than to learn by trial and error.
What slows or stops a disease epidemic if the pathogen is still present? It appears that wild frogs are becoming increasingly resistant to the chytrid fungal disease that has decimated amphibian populations around the world.
About 66 million years ago, a radical change on the Earth filled tropical forests with flowers. A new catalog of fossil pollen grains may hold an explanation.
Coral reef fish often see a very different seascape that humans do. Using the evolutionary laboratory created by the Isthmus of Panama, Michele Pierotti is learning exactly how they view their underwater world.
Research projects in our lab combine approaches from behavioral ecology, functional morphology, ethology and evolution of behavior. Our work focuses mostly on the ultimate and proximate causes of behavior in an ecological and social context, with an emphasis on how ecological or social...
